


light at the end

by hellalujah



Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drug Addiction (not main characters), Illustrated, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Nightmares, Past Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-16 22:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10580577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellalujah/pseuds/hellalujah
Summary: I forgive you, says Hugo's voice in his head, over and over.Now if only Porter could believe that.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [midastouch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midastouch/gifts).



> a continuation to [it was just a little mistake](http://leclercq.tumblr.com/post/155968953252/it-was-just-a-little-mistake) by andy - my take on what happens after
> 
> beta'd by [kate](http://torrurised.tumblr.com/) / art by [kao](http://swag-machine.tumblr.com/)
> 
> disclaimers: i've never hotwired a car, i've never stolen from walmart, i have no idea how these things actually work but i did some questionable googling to find out
> 
> soundtrack: [clarian - is there light at the end](https://soundcloud.com/asoftrecordlabel/clarian-is-there-light-at-the-end) / [puscifer - momma sed (live)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xU_PnREF4) / [röyksopp - running to the sea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzz_Bm0uaWs) / [daft punk - digital love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOngRDVtEQI)

It takes over a month for the nightmares to let up.

They don’t stop completely, not that Porter had expected them to. For them to go away entirely is a distant hope that he doesn’t let himself hold onto. He doesn’t deserve that.

 _I forgive you,_ says Hugo’s voice in his head, right on cue. _Remember that._

“Sure,” Porter says out loud to himself and the girl at the gas station register eyes him warily.

He forces a smile, tips the beak of Hugo's cap at her. She quirks an eyebrow and he turns away and huddles into his hoodie.

It’s the edge of winter and it’s been unnaturally cold this year. He’s been thinking about getting out of the city, heading south.

Like a bird, he thinks wryly. Following migration patterns and finding somewhere warm to hide out until the spring.

Hugo would've liked that.

He glances at the cashier and she’s not looking at him anymore so he stuffs a handful of protein bars into his hoodie pocket.

He’s got a bright smile for her when he walks up and sets down a beer, hands over his ID - fake name, fake birthdate, fake address - and forks over enough cash for it. She barely looks at him. Just scans his ID and asks if he wants a bag and then sends him on his way.

He hasn’t eaten in a few days, so the protein bars are necessary. The beer is also necessary, just in a different way.

\---

He’d left their car behind after - well. After.

So he hitchhikes across the state line and makes it to the airport in Portland with such little fanfare that it makes him almost uneasy. But he keeps going, sneaks into the long term parkade without drawing any real attention to himself.

Someone's shitty Ford sedan is parked at the back of the lot, something from the seventies that it takes Porter less than a minute to jimmy the lock on. He’s good with locks.

Getting it started is another thing entirely. Hotwiring had always sort of been Hugo's thing.

He has to shake his head, physical motion to shake the thought way.

It takes a few minutes to get the casing off the steering column. Several minutes more to strip the wires and then breathe and figure out which connect to which. When he finally touches them together he singes his fucking fingers, of course he does, and he can practically hear Hugo laughing at him for it.

He sits back in the driver’s seat and bites down on his tongue till he tastes copper, stares at his burnt fingertips. And then he tries again and the car starts and he nearly cries with relief.

The car is automatic and he's thankful. He sucks at driving stick.

\---

There’s a Walmart in some shitty town called Grants Pass that he pulls into well after dark. It’s easy to walk in - smile just wide enough to be casual at the single security guard watching over the whole store - and walk out with a backpack full of snacks and a bottle of vodka.

The security tag is easy enough to disable with the magnet he keeps in his pocket. Another of Hugo’s tricks.

He gets back to the car and he considers sleeping there in the Walmart parking lot but that would be too cocky, even for him. So he starts the car again - and he doesn’t singe his fingers this time - and drives until he’s out of town and then he keeps going.

He goes south-west instead of south-east and he drives through thick forest that closes in on him in the dark. The headlights of his car spill across the highway and it’s barely enough light to see, barely enough to do anything but cast eerie, strobing shadows.

They’re like ghosts. He drives a little faster.

Eventually he hits another town, right on the ocean, and finds a parking lot near the beach.

He reclines his seat. He could crawl into the back seat and sprawl out, he knows, but it's easier this way. Easier getaway from here.

He still thinks that way. He'll never stop thinking that way.

Probably he should sleep. He cracks the vodka bottle first instead.

\---

In his dream he hears the echoes of gunshots. The echoes of someone’s screaming. The echoes of his own screaming.

Hugo is there and they stare at each other across a vast distance.

“It hurts,” Hugo tells him and his voice is loud as if it were in Porter’s ear.

“I'm sorry,” Porter says.

The entry wound wasn't there but it is now and abruptly there's blood pouring down Hugo's face and his brows come together.

“It hurts,” he says again. “It hurts, Porter, it hurts.”

“I know,” says Porter but it comes out as a sob. “I know, I'm sorry.”

Hugo reaches out and he's crying and Porter reaches for him but he's impossibly far away.

He jolts up in the front seat of the car and smacks his elbow on the steering wheel. The horn goes off and he jolts again, only barely manages to muffle the sound he wants to make by biting down on the heel of his palm.

He breathes raggedly, sits there with his hand in his mouth, teeth pressing in and in and he doesn’t break skin but he comes close.

It’s five in the morning but there’s no way he’s falling back asleep, not with the way his heart his pounding. Not with the way Hugo’s face flashes behind his eyelids every time he blinks.

He starts the car and he drives.

\---

The sun is coming up when he passes through the redwoods and he thinks about stopping and watching. Light is streaming in through thick foliage, in between massive trunks.

Hugo’d always wanted to go here. Somehow they hadn't made it this far south, even if it wasn't so very far at all.

Porter pulls the cap lower over his eyes and keeps driving.

\---

It’s midday when he makes it to San Francisco and he thinks about sticking around for the day.

He’s got family here - an estranged brother he hasn’t spoken to in a couple of years and Porter could conceivably go looking for him.

Instead he ends up at another Walmart. He buys a pack of cigarettes there, asks for Hugo’s brand without thinking. Hands over the bills and pockets his change.

He doesn’t smoke, but Hugo had, and it’s something to do.

He doesn’t light up when he gets back to the car. He drives out to the wharf, parks his car and heads out onto a pier.

The ocean is eerily calm. Porter sits on the end of the pier and turns the cigarette pack over and over in his hands. It takes him a long time to open it and get one in his mouth. A longer time to actually light it and he chokes and coughs wildly on the first drag.

He gets the hang of it eventually.

\---

He leaves San Francisco without talking to anyone except for the cashier at Walmart.

LA isn’t far and he makes it there just after sunset, drives through the hills and deeper into the downtown area.

He makes note of a motel before he ditches the car in some slummy neighbourhood that he doesn’t bother learning the name of. He’s sure by now the owner’s reported it stolen and the plates will be hot for a while and he might as well leave the evidence somewhere it looks like it belongs.

\---

When he wakes up in the morning there’s a kid spray painting an elaborate tag across the back wall of the motel that Porter checks into.

Not a kid, he realizes when he comes around into the alley. A guy probably his age, maybe a little older. Bearded, shaggy hair curling out from under a snapback. Thick glasses and a cigarette dangling from plush lips.

Porter adjusts Hugo’s cap on his head. He hasn’t actually spoken to anyone who wasn’t a receptionist or a cashier in a month.

“Hey,” he calls and the guy flinches, freezes with his spray can still lifted. When he looks at Porter his eyes are wide and dark. Wary like a cornered animal.

He looks like he’s going to bolt. It’s almost comical, the way he stays completely still with his arm outstretched.

“Do you have a lighter?” Porter asks.

\---

It doesn’t take Porter long to get a name - “Mat,” the guy says, “just Mat.” - and the lighter he’d asked for and abruptly he finds himself walking through the city streets with a complete stranger.

Mat smells like pot and cigarette smoke - not Hugo’s brand, Porter notices right away - and something else that Porter can’t place. It doesn’t seem important.

They walk to the river and smoke there in oddly companionable silence. Mat points out one of his tags on the concrete on the other side of the aqueduct and Porter looks but mostly he’s caught up by the swirls of ink peeking out from under his sleeve. Doodley designs across his knuckles and a skull - uncharacteristic, somehow, even though Porter’s only known him a couple of hours - on the back of his hand.

Absently Porter wants to ask to see them all. To touch and trace over the vines wrapping around his wrist, to brush fingertips over bright gold and orange flowers up the side of his neck.

A phone dings and it isn’t Porter’s. Porter hasn’t had a phone in months.

“I have to go,” Mat says uncomfortably after he checks his texts, glancing up so conspicuously that Porter almost rolls his eyes. “I have to… yeah.”

Porter straightens up when Mat does and watches him for a second. “Can I come?” Mat jumps and turns to look at him with wide eyes.

“Are you a cop?” Mat blurts.

Porter laughs for the first time in a long time and shakes his head. “Fuck no.”

\---

It’s a drug deal, like Porter had expected. What he hadn’t expected was Mat passing over a tiny bag to a toothless man, so skinny it makes Porter’s stomach ache sympathetically.

The contents of the bag glitter faintly in the sun.

“Was that meth?” Porter asks after they walk away.

Mat’s quiet for a long time before he shrugs uncomfortably. “I owe some people some money.”

Porter doesn’t press it.

\---

“I'm not a prostitute,” Mat tells him when Porter invites him to stay the night.

“I didn't think that you were,” Porter says. “You just looked like you might want somewhere to be.”

Mat wrinkles his nose and shoots him a look. “I'm not _homeless_ either.”

Porter laughs and it surprises him. Twice in one day.

“I didn’t think that either,” he says.

\---

“It hurts,” Hugo says, sort of thoughtful.

Porter doesn't say anything. Hugo's still far away and Porter doesn't try to reach for him.

“It hurts, Porter,” Hugo says again, dreamy and soft. His head tips back and his eyes fall shut.

“I know,” Porter whispers. “I'm sorry.”

“I forgive you,” says Hugo's voice. His mouth doesn't move.

In the dream, Porter's fists clench at his sides. “You shouldn't.”

Hugo's eyes open again and very suddenly he's right in front of Porter, blood flecked face bare inches away.

“I forgive you,” he says firmly and Porter wants to reach out but he can't anymore. “I forgive you, remember that.”

\---

Mat’s trying to sneak out the next morning when Porter wakes up.

He’s halfway into his t-shirt and Porter watches him struggle, watches the flex of wiry muscle under tattooed skin. He’s covered in them, Porter’s found out, some classic designs of birds, a strangely adorable tabby cat up his back. Antlers spread across his stomach and a couple more of those mysteriously out of place skulls. But mostly flowers and plants in bright flares of colour down his arms and across his chest.

Porter blinks and lets his eyes drag up and down Mat’s body. He’s skinny but strong, hips jutting in a vaguely familiar way.

He’s not Hugo, Porter reminds himself. Not at all.

Mat turns and flinches when he sees Porter watching.

“I was just, you know, I-,”

“Do you want to have breakfast?” Porter asks before Mat can stumble over his words any more and he’s not sure why but when Mat’s cheeks go pink it makes Porter want to smile.

He doesn’t, but he wants to.

\---

Mat stays with him at the hotel again that night and awkwardly pays for both their breakfasts the next morning.

“Do you actually like, have money?” he asks Porter uncomfortably as they're leaving and Porter shrugs, thumbs at the brim of Hugo’s cap.

“No,” he says. “Not really.”

Mat eyes him for a moment and it's the most eye contact Porter's dealt with in a month.

And then Mat looks away. “Do you want to crash at my place?”

\---

He doesn't know what he's expecting when Mat unlocks an apartment in a rundown building. Something as rundown as the building itself, maybe. Something scruffy and hard like Mat.

But Mat opens the door and there are plants everywhere. Stout trees with wide emerald leaves, succulents on every surface and creeping vines in the corners. In a tiny box on the windowsill Porter's pretty sure he sees a tomato plant.

Otherwise it’s tidy. Neat stacks of books on the coffee table, a closed laptop. A photo of what must be Mat’s family hanging just a bit crooked on the wall.

“It's not much,” Mat says gruffly as he toes his shoes off. “But you don't have to pay for it and, like, it's home.”

“It's great,” Porter says and he means it.

\---

He goes with Mat on a handful of drug deals. Pot, mostly, only three or four baggies of tiny shards of meth, and Porter’s glad for that somehow. He’s figured out that Mat is perpetually scowling but it turns to something deeper when they go out on meth deals.

“This your boyfriend, Matty?” a skeletal woman asks as Mat hands off her drugs.

“No,” Mat mutters. His face is beet red when Porter glances at him out of the corner of his eye.

Her teeth are black when she grins and laughs but she seems genuine and Porter isn't really surprised when he manages to smile back.

“Take care of him,” she tells Porter. “He's a sweet boy, tries to pretend he isn't but he is.”

Mat makes an irritated noise and Porter smiles.

\---

They share a cigarette in bed and Porter runs his fingers over the tattoos on Mat’s forearm. Mat barely flinches, for once.

“What are these?”

Mat sticks the cigarette between his lips and points at a cluster of flowers that Porter thought were roses at first glance. “Begonias, for caution,” he says, a little slurred with the cigarette in the way. He turns his arm over to show off a delicate stem of lily-like flowers done in watercolour, a wrap of leafy green vines. “Asphodel and ivy, regret and fidelity.”

Porter only has a passing knowledge of… flower language, or whatever it is. It’s fairly clear that Mat’s put a lot of thought into each and every piece on his body.

Without really thinking about it Porter wraps a hand delicately around Mat’s throat. Mat’s eyes flutter shut.

“What about this one?” Porter murmurs, slipping his hand around the back of Mat’s neck and brushing a thumb across the blooms of bright orange.

Mat swallows and his eyes stay shut.

“Marigolds,” he says eventually. “Grief.”

He doesn’t go on and Porter doesn’t ask. Just takes the cigarette from between Mat’s lips and takes a drag.

\---

The dreams aren't nearly as bad now. Hugo is still far away, still bleeding. He's not crying anymore, though, not calling out. Just watching.

“I love you,” Porter tells him one night and he thinks Hugo smiles.

He wakes up with tears trickling down his cheeks and he doesn't feel much of anything but he's definitely crying.

“S’wrong?” Mat mumbles against his shoulder and Porter shakes his head.

“Go back to sleep.”

\---

Mat has to meet with a distributor of some sort, someone Mat won't meet his eyes while he talks about.

There's a part of Porter buried under everything that desperately wants to go with Mat. To keep him safe, save him like he couldn't save Hugo.

He thinks abstractly of the woman, the addict. _“Take care of him.”_

He hesitates.

Early afternoon sunlight is streaming in through the windows, slotting through the leaves of a brilliant green fern. Absently Porter goes to the kitchen to find a glass to water the plants.

It’s easy. Domestic, even.

He closes his eyes and breathes in - pot smoke and gardenia and curry from three nights ago.

 _“I forgive you,”_ says Hugo's voice in his head.

He forces his eyes open. He doesn’t have much further to go, he reasons.

After that it doesn’t take long to decide and he doesn't tell Mat he's going. He just goes.

He leaves Mat's apartment and walks a few blocks before he finds a car that someone’s left their keys in. The fucking thing is unlocked.

Serendipitous, he thinks as he drives away.

\---

The tank is nearly empty and he hadn’t realized but he makes it to a tiny, tiny town barely an hour outside of Los Angeles and pulls into a gas station.

The girl at the counter is cute, probably underage and definitely just watching the shop for someone else.

Porter puts on his best panicked face and rushes into the gas station.

“Excuse me, oh, this is-,” He ducks his head like he's ashamed. He was good at drama in high school and that's about it. “This is awful and embarrassing, I'm so sorry.”

The girl perks up and when he meets her eyes she's watching him with more curiosity than wariness.

“Are you okay?” she asks and he thinks abstractly that her accent isn't from this side of the country. A sort of drawl, maybe from Louisiana.

He forces out a laugh, watery and distraught. “Someone _stole_ my wallet,” he says in an undertone. She looks shocked until he tells her he came from LA.

She purses her lips. “Lots of crime in the city,” she says, nodding sagely.

She gives him his gas for free, sends him off with a water bottle and some snacks as well and Porter really genuinely hopes that she doesn't get in much trouble for it.

\---

He stops in a town just before he gets into San Diego because he can’t handle the city right now.

It’s a little town on the beach and he doesn’t bother stopping in anywhere for food, doesn’t bother looking for a motel.

The sun is setting when he parks - another lot at another beach and the déjà vu is unsettling - and he reclines his seat, just a bit, lets his eyes fall shut.

The car window is cracked when he falls asleep and the sound of the surf follows him into his dreams.

\---

Hugo is there and it’s still dark only this time he’s standing in the ocean. The water weaves around his knees. Porter looks down and his own feet are half-buried in the sand.

It’s very quiet, apart from the sound of waves lapping at the shore.

“You look like an angel,” Hugo tells him. The sun is setting behind him, gory red and orange, but Hugo’s not bleeding this time.

“I’m sorry,” Porter tries to say only his mouth is filled with sand too. Hugo smiles.

“I forgive you,” he says, before he disappears under the surface.

The water is so dark and for a moment with the sun’s reflection it looks like blood.

Porter jolts up in the car.

He doesn’t slam on the horn this time but his heart is pounding all the same. The car feels too small, claustrophobic and suffocating and he struggles with the door handle until he nearly topples out onto the parking lot pavement. He rights himself eventually and looks up, looks toward the ocean -

The sun is rising behind him, he realizes, not over the water. It still looks like blood.

Porter makes it to the sand before he throws up, falls to his knees and it hurts less than dropping to the ground on the concrete would have been.

He fumbles his last cigarette out with shaking hands, gets it in his mouth and lights it. It almost calms him down.

\---

He's never been this far south before.

He doesn’t have a passport so he can’t cross the border into Mexico, not that he’d ever really intended on going there. Not that he’d even intended on making it this far.

He’s not sure what he’d intended at all, now that he’s thinking about it.

It’s still early but the sun is blazing overhead when he passes through San Diego, when he gets to Chula Vista and stops to buy a new pack of cigarettes.

He buys them. Doesn’t bother trying to lift them or anything else from the 7-Eleven just off the highway.

The car stays behind, parked near some high school where someone will notice it sooner rather than later. It’s a long walk out to the beach, an hour or more along a mostly paved road that shifts into dusty gravel with no warning.

The road winds through foothills and fields and ranches and Porter’s never seen so many horses in his life. Part of him wants to stumble down through the ditch, reach out over a fence and touch. He’s never been on a horse, never touched one.

He keeps walking. The sun’s beating down even in late October and the back of his neck is starting to burn.

\---

The beach is quiet.

It’s peaceful out here, apart from the border patrol boats Porter can see out on the water. Far enough from shore that they probably can’t see him.

He still doesn’t know what he’s going to _do_ exactly. But it feels like he’s where he’s meant to be. Like he’s reached an end.

He considers, detachedly, how much effort it might be to drown himself. To walk out into the ocean until he’s treading water, to tread water until he’s too exhausted to go on. To let himself sink and suck in lungfuls of water.

It’s not a quick death, he knows. Not easy.

The idea of hopping the border fence and hoping for someone to shoot him seems… distasteful somehow. He doesn’t think he wants to go out that way though there’d be some sort of poetry in it.

He takes a long, slow breath. Sits down in the sand.

The sun is starting to set. Fiery red and orange and gold in a brilliant flare across the sky. Reflected red and glinting off the water.

He lays down and pulls Hugo’s cap over his eyes.

\---

He doesn’t dream.

\---

He wakes up and the sky is going lighter behind him, still dark over the horizon along the ocean.

Porter blinks blearily.

He’s got sand in his mouth - he’d rolled over in his sleep and now his tongue is coated, grit between his teeth and on his gums and he spits irritably to try and get it out.

And then he reaches up to run a hand through his hair and his heart leaps into his throat.

Hugo’s hat is gone.

He twists around, scrambles up onto his hands and knees to look for it and then halts.

It’s a few feet away, settled in the sand. It looks comfortable, somehow. Like it belongs.

Like it should maybe stay there.

Porter stays frozen on all fours for a long time before he shuffles forward and runs his fingertips over the beak of the hat.

The sky is pinking in the east.

\---

The sun is almost entirely over the horizon when Porter makes it back to the car.

It hasn’t been picked up yet and he’s thankful. The water bottle from the gas station is still half full, tucked into the foot-well of the passenger seat and he chugs it back in grateful swallows. He ends up swallowing a lot of sand as well but he doesn’t mind.

He smokes a cigarette before he gets back in the driver’s seat, crushes the butt under his heel and climbs in. The radio has been on the whole time, he realizes, nearly inaudible.

He turns it up, just a little, and then he starts to laugh. It’s a song Hugo had loved, a song _he_ had loved.

Porter wonders if Mat might like it too and that makes him laugh harder, grinning wide and manic. He’s still smiling when he runs a hand through his hair and it doesn’t bother him that Hugo’s hat is gone.

“But suddenly I feel the shining sun,” he hums along as he pulls out of the lot. “Before I knew it this dream was all gone...” He drums his palms on the steering wheel, cracks the window and heads north, back toward Los Angeles.


End file.
